"I know it," madam retorted, with a defiant toss of her head; "but you may thank yourself for it, after all; for, almost at the last moment, I repented—I was on the point of giving the whole thing up and letting the play go on without any change of characters, when your faithlessness turned me into a demon, and doomed the girl."
"I believe you are a 'demon'—your jealousy has been the bane of your whole life and mine; and now you have ruined the future of as beautiful and pure a girl as ever walked the earth," said Gerald Goddard, with a threatening brow, and in a tone so deadly cold that the woman beside him shivered.
"Pshaw! don't be so tragic," she said, after a moment, and assuming an air of lightness, "the affair will end all right—when Edith comes fully to herself and realizes the situation, I am sure she will make up her mind to submit gracefully to the inevitable."
"She shall not—I will help her to break the tie that binds her to him."
"Will you?" mockingly questioned his wife. "How pray?"
"By claiming that she was tricked into the marriage."
"How will you prove that, Gerald?" was the smiling query.
The man was dumb. He knew he could not prove it.
"Did she not go willingly enough to the altar?" pursued madam. "Did she not repeat the responses freely and unhesitatingly? Was she not married by a regularly ordained minister? and was she not introduced afterward to hundreds of people as the wife of my brother, and did she not respond as such to the name of Mrs. Correlli? I hardly think you could make out a case, Gerald."
"But the fact that the Kerbys were called away by telegram, and that some one was needed to supply their places, would prove that Edith had no knowledge of the affair—at least until the last moment," said Mr. Goddard, eagerly seizing upon that point.